


“Zoé Maurello, Seventh Handmaiden in the Second Class for Padmé Amidala”

by Polgarawolf



Series: Star Wars: You Became to Me [11]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy
Genre: F/F, F/M, Handmaidens, Original Character Death(s), Original Character(s), POV Original Character, Sacrificial ethics, War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-10-04
Updated: 2007-10-04
Packaged: 2017-11-13 07:15:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,625
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/500879
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Polgarawolf/pseuds/Polgarawolf
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is fifteen random but chronological moments from the life of Zoé Maurello, who is, quite literally, the seventh handmaiden in the second training class of potential handmaidens chosen from among a large pool of applicants for the job for the newly elected Nabooian Queen Padmé Amidala. There is an actual story here – one small thread among the vast woven tapestry of life that is the living history of the galaxy, stretched out and twisted, knotted into the whole, curled down among the roots of time, connecting various moments together – but one must read between the lines to capture it. It is not precisely the truth, for the subtle story of these moments is sketched out here in words, and, in the sin of writing down a life, it inevitably changes the shape of things. But it is nevertheless a form of truth. (From a certain point of view . . . )</p>
            </blockquote>





	“Zoé Maurello, Seventh Handmaiden in the Second Class for Padmé Amidala”

**Author's Note:**

> **Warning:** This story functions as a sort of compressed codex for Zoé Maurello’s life, as she is going to be written (or at least referred to) in my not even nearly complete AU **Star Wars** series ** _You Became to Me_**. If anything doesn’t make sense, please feel free to ask!
> 
>  **Author’s Notes: 1.)** Again, this not-quite-a-story is compatible with my SW AU series **_You Became to Me_** , including the trilogy _Thwarting the Revenge of the Sith_ , if you squint at a couple of things sideways and view a few others solely through the lens of Zoé Maurello’s eyes. **2.)** Although this is technically modeled on a prompt set that I borrowed from somewhere on the LJ (I really don’t recall from where anymore, though if someone would like to set the record straight, I’ll add the info for the community in question here in my notes), it’s not meant to function as a response to whatever the challenge actually is that’s associated with said LJ prompt set. I just used the specific prompts to give me a reason to string together a backstory of sorts for Zoé. **3.)** Readers might want to consider the fact that Zoé, like a lot of native Nabooians, is fairly strong in the Force, but that she hasn’t received any training whatsoever to speak of and so has no real conscious control over that sensitivity to the Force. **4.)** Readers interested in knowing who the physical models are for original characters like Zoé should please consult the latest versions of my posted lists of cast original and EU characters and for handmaid(en)s and other important Nabooian characters, which are available on my LJ! For clarity’s sake, though, Zoé is physically modeled on a teenaged Julianna Rose Mauriello, and Zoé Maurello’s (baby) brother, Jarrisen, should be pictured as a young (not quite twelve, when the Trade Federation occupies Naboo) Jonathan Jackson. Please note that characters who may be alluded to but not referenced by name (certain family members of original characters, for example) are considered too minor to be cast at this time, and readers should feel free to imagine them howsoever they wish! **5.)** Readers may want to keep in mind (for the purposes of later stories) that there’s a reason to care why the former Princess of Theed, Adeé Ashtara Russe, may’ve had a torrid affair fairly late in her (surprisingly) sole term as Queen of Naboo with Cianus Tammesin, a member of her staff and royal court . . . In fact, readers just might want to keep in mind that Zoé's visions tend to be a lot more important than she tends to believe and remember those visions! **6.)** Handmaidens often tend to pair off, as is the case here, with Zoé Maurello and Remmé Hileagh (which is why I added the relationship label for original female characters). **7.)** Speaking of pairings, I've labeled this to indicate both Padmé Amidala's and Sabé's love for Obi-Wan, because, even though it may not be specifically mentioned in this character study piece, handmaid(en)s know so much about their sworn Lady that readers can be certain that Zoé, like all of Amidala's other handmaid(en)s who knew him (or knew of him), would have surely known about both their Lady's and Sabé's love and high regard for Obi-Wan, just as they would have known about how much Amidala and Sabé love one another!
> 
>  **Story Notes:** **1.)** Since this is part of a larger on-going AU series that in some respects fairly closely mirrors or follows events of canon (up to a certain point, anyway), readers should please keep in mind that certain characters and events from the prequel movies/novelizations of the films and even events/places/people referenced in the EU or Expanded Universe may be mentioned or alluded to in this story. If anyone has any questions about whether someone or something is AU, canon, or EU canon, please feel free to ask! **2.)** Readers should probably be aware that I am roughly estimating (guestimating might be a better word) the original publication date for most of the character study pieces in the **_You Became to Me_** series (and indeed most of my stories, especially the ones written over a long period of time), based on when I roughed out notes for them in the story notebooks I carry everywhere with me and when I can recall having worked on certain groups of characters. The year is going to be accurate, but the month might be off and the day will almost certainly be randomly chosen, since the online account I had originally posted many of these stories to no longer exists. I tend to go back and edit things that are in series whenever I get the time or a new idea causes me to have to make room for something else plot-wise, and odds are good that a story could have been edited for typos as recently as the day of its posting here, but the original version will likely be much older and fairly close to the publication date that I attach to it, if anyone's curious!

**“Zoé Maurello, Seventh Handmaiden in the Second Class for Padmé Amidala”**

 

 **01.) Resemble:** She does and she doesn’t resemble their new Queen – her face is heart-shaped, true enough, but it’s longer and thinner, with a much sharper and more prominent chin, than Queen Amidala’s is; her eyes are brown, but the eyebrows over them are more triangular in shape than the Queen’s nearly straight ones, and the nose beneath them is both longer and more sharply prominent than the Queen’s more classically straight nose is; her hair is brown, but it’s also just a bit darker in hue and naturally straight, unlike the Queen’s naturally quite curly hair; she’s much of a height with and has a slim build similar to the Queen’s, but she’s also got no chest to speak of to fill out a dress and frankly thinks that her hips are all but nonexistent (which, in her opinion, gives her slender form a much more boyish shape, overall, than that possessed by the Queen’s lovely, graceful, and slender but still obviously quite female figure) – and so she hesitates over submitting an application to become a handmaiden for the Queen, agonizing over her appearance (so skinny and plain, compared to their beautiful new flower-like Queen!), until finally her (only, younger) brother (Jarrisen, who’s always getting after her for being so self-conscious, insisting that she’s beautiful) snatches the datapad away from her and hits the _send_ button on the built-in holocomm before she can manage to rip the device back away from him.

 **02.) Believe:** She can’t believe that they’ve actually accepted her into the second handmaiden trainee class, and so she keeps pinching herself, to try to wake herself up, until the insides of both of her arms are black and blue and one of the principal handmaidens – a girl even younger than she is (and much more lovely than she is, too, she cannot help but notice, with a luscious full mouth and a flower-like face the shape of which is delicately balanced between that of an oval and that of a heart-shape), whose name, she later learns, is Yané Cashillé – catches her doing it and takes her aside to make certain that she’s not deliberately trying to give herself pain and just having a hard time adjusting to the fact that she’s really awake and not dreaming.

 **03.) Remember:** She isn’t extremely clever, really, it’s just that she remembers everything she sees and hears, and it makes her seem a lot more intelligent than she actually is, even though being able to recollect everything like that doesn’t necessarily mean that she understands a whit of what she’s recalling word for word or can figure out how to use the information for any kind of truly practical purpose, so she doesn’t really understand why some of the other handmaiden trainees seem to think that it’s something that makes her special.

 **04.) Daydream:** She spends entirely too much of her time zoning out in the classes where she doesn’t need to really understand or master information so much as simply be able to remember it and regurgitate it at will, daydreaming about one fantastical thing or another, and sometimes, when her mind drifts, she _sees_ things that she knows, somehow, either have happened or are happening, elsewhere, or might very well happen, sometime in the future, if she (or someone else) doesn’t specifically do something to keep them from coming about, though most of what she _sees_ is either so disconnected from her (really, why should she care, if Queen Ashtara – Adeé Russe – and a member of her staff and royal court, Cianus Tammesin, had a torrid affair, sometime during the latter half of her surprisingly single term on the throne?) or so trivial (so a Gungan somewhere tripped over his big feet and ended up crashing some kind of boat that he’d borrowed without first asking permission to take out. So what? What does some random Gungan have to do with her?) or so completely fantastical (really, like the Queen is going to attempt to seduce one Jedi and then go on to secretly wed another, much younger one!) that she usually doesn’t pay the visions any more mind than she does to her idle dreams and fancies.

 **05.) Doodles:** She doodles what she sees in some of her visions, sometimes – sketching clothing and shoes and such, settings for trysts and attempts at seduction, the way the light catches on a gem or gleams off a bright eye, collecting small details that obscure the truth of the identities of the bodies of the individuals she’s drawing – and then goes back and cleans some of them up, later (being very, _very_ careful to only pick ones that couldn’t possibly get anyone she knows in trouble), so that she can turn them in for various projects concerned with costumes that would be suitable for the Queen and for her handmaidens, to let the handmaidens all fade softly together, _en masse_ , into the background, and to swallow up the truth of Padmé Amidala (or whichever decoy might happen to be wearing the guise of Amidala, in order to keep the Queen safe) and so utterly dazzle and distract the eye that the beholder will see nothing but the splendor and richness and intricacy of that costume and little to nothing of the body that is actually wearing it.

 **06.) Nightmare:** She wakes one night screaming fit to wake the dead, plagued by nightmarish images of one of her fellow handmaiden trainees – Essé, the one with the strangely flat blue eyes who keeps so much to herself and who sometimes brags of how highly Captain Panaka thinks of her and how strongly he recommended her for this class – drenched with blood, those unnerving blue eyes and her gleaming white teeth the only bits of her face that aren’t vividly crimson with the sanguine fluid, her naked body not just spattered scarlet but deliberately painted in whorls and swirls and hand-shapes that look sickeningly like what might result if a lover went overboard with massage oil or edible body paint, fingerprints smeared on her buttocks and upper thighs and the curve of her breasts, blood stiffening her nipples and dripping down her belly towards the core of her, and, perhaps most horrifically of all, she is grinning insanely as she lovingly licks the edge of a gore-spattered dagger, her tongue and lips dancing obscenely along the slightly curved blade as if in an act of fellatio, and, no matter how many times the trainees who’ve responded to her screams (Dané, Shelanné, and Nanné, whose rooms are closest to her quarters) tell her that it was just a nightmare and that things are alright now and she’s safe here, she can’t quite shake the sickening sensation that what she just saw wasn’t just some random, meaningless bad dream, but something that’s going to come to pass, and in the very near future. 

**07.) Attraction:** She is powerfully attracted to one of the girls in their training class – Remmé Hileagh, a girl with wonderfully alive (and not at all eerily strange and flat) bright blue eyes and slightly reddish brown hair and a gorgeously heart-shaped face with a mouth that makes her want to fling herself forward upon those lips and cover them with worshipful kisses – and she can tell, from the way her heart at once flutters and yet stills, whenever Remmé even so much as looks at her for more than a few seconds together at a time, that it’s not just some schoolgirlish crush, but instead something that could easily blossom into a full-fledged, lifelong love, and a part of her wants that, desperately, but the rest of her is terrified that the attraction might be one-sided, and, anyway, she’s not all that sure she could do anything about it, even if Remmé by some miracle happened to return the sentiment, because every time she closes her eyes, she sees that horrific blood-soaked image of Essé and her blood runs cold and her stomach flips and churns terribly and she feels as if she’s going to be imminently quite spectactularly sick.

 **08.) Snag:** She can’t keep herself from following Remmé with her eyes, even when she should be paying attention to the instructors or to what she’s supposed to be doing for her classes, and, apparently, she’s obvious enough in her watching that Remmé notices, because one day, as she’s about to try to duck past Remmé in the hallway on the way back to her room, she finds Remmé reaching out to snag her hand . . . and reel her in for an embrace and a kiss and, oh, _oh_ , that’s all she needed, apparently, for the nightmarish images to all vanish away, and she finds herself winding her arms strongly around Remmé’s neck and back and snugging their bodies even more closely together, as close together as possible, able to spare a thought to marvel over how perfectly they seem to fit together before becoming distracted by other, even more wonderful discoveries, as she allows herself to be drawn off down the hallway and into Remmé’s bedroom.

 **09.) Night:** The first night they are together, she dreams of light, swallowing her and her beloved whole, and, when she wakes, she cannot decide whether she is crying for longing or for fear of whatever it is that’s to come. 

**10.) Disaster:** It’s a disaster worse than anyone could have imagined (for who in their right mind _ever_ would have dreamed that a race of beings as cowardly as the Neimoidians could make an organization known both for its bullying and for its penchant for backing down and turning tail at the first sign of an organized force being used or even so much as threatened against them, as the Trade Federation is, turn about so much that they would actually go so far as to not only purchase but to use armies of battle droids against a free and sovereign Republic world like Naboo?); yet, somehow, she’s not all that terribly surprised to find herself running and firing her blasters and flinging her daggers and snarling a triumphant smile back over her shoulder when one of her throwing knives nicks Essé’s right arm and jars her just enough to throw off her aim and allow Princess Ellie to escape with them with only the most glancing of hits from a blaster to her left arm (scalding it badly, without a doubt, but not burning nearly deeply enough to damage the nerves or the muscles), instead of being cut down in cold blood by that damned traitor.

 **11.) Sell:** She knows that Amidala made it safely away, no matter how many doctored images of the Queen’s ship exploding over Naboo the Trade Federation circulates, and she can tell that the other handmaidens share her certainty; unfortunately, though, it’s a much harder point to sell to the everyday people of Naboo, who don’t know the Queen as they do and lack the connection to her that they’ve gained, in their time in service with her, and the people need that hope to cling to, badly, as a reason to keep fighting, against such seemingly unsurpassable odds, so one of their first real missions (aside from those involving the gathering up of necessities of food, water, shelter, weapons, medical supplies, clothing, etc.) inevitably is to hack into the computer system being used by the Viceroy and his minions to feed those doctored images out over the local HoloNet channels of the Naboo message exchange, highlighting what’s been altered and releasing suppressed information that proves beyond doubt that the images are, in fact, false.

 **12.) Vision:** When two weeks starts to stretch into three and there’s still no sign of the Queen’s return, she begins to fear that something must have happened and that Amidala might be stranded somewhere far from both Naboo and Coruscant, and so she starts to try to deliberately summon up a vision that will show her where her Queen is and how she’s doing; all she gets, for all her troubles, though, is a series of confusing images involving an extremely tall Jedi with long brown hair and piercing blue eyes in a somehow leonine face raiding a slave camp on a desert planet and stealing away a small boy (perhaps one and a half or two? It’s hard to tell, the child’s so badly beaten and painfully, conspicuously malnourished) with bright coppery hair and eyes like the light of twinned blue stars somehow made flesh, a beautiful young man with black hair and sloe eyes and a mouth so full that it puts even Yané’s to shame who determinedly tries to steal that boy away as he’s growing into a man, and then the man the child has become, trying to place himself protectively between the Jedi with long brown hair (now graying) and yet another child (perhaps eight? Again, it’s difficult to tell, for the child has obviously never had quite as much to eat as he really ought to) with blazing blue eyes and sun-kissed skin and gilded hair, with nary a sign or even so much as a flicker of her lady’s skirts to be found amongst them.

 **13.) Insane:** She cries in unabashed relief when Queen Amidala finally returns to them, even though the Senate sent her no help to speak of but the Jedi who helped her make her escape from the world in the first place and she has some insane plan for winning the planet back that’s so obviously desperate and foolhardy that Zoé can’t believe the Jedi are seriously allowing Amidala to contemplate going through with it, and the Jedi are the man with the leonine face and the boy-man with star-blue eyes and coppery hair, and they have a boy with them named Anakin who is the other boy from her vision and who gives her such a strange feeling of mixed uneasiness (bordering on fear) and of the same wit-smothering blindly bedazzled fascination that she feels whenever she looks on the younger Jedi (the Padawan learner, the copper-haired boy now grown to a man) that she can hardly bear to look at him at all, for the confusion the sight of him brings.

 **14.) Decency:** Dealing with the traitors and turncoats from amongst their own people is far and away worse than dealing with the Trade Federation and its minions, and she’s almost glad, in a way, that some of the worst ones – the ones whose betrayal and treachery she feels the most personally, since the traitors were once members of the Queen’s own handmaiden coterie – have had the decency to either get themselves killed or else to flee the planet (and, if it please the Great Lady, hopefully will get themselves captured by pirates or slavers and summarily killed, once they’ve fled from Naboo), rather than being captured, because she honestly isn’t sure she’d be able to deal with them at all rationally, if they were still on Naboo and still in any kind of shape to be punished for their treasonous actions.

 **15.) Light:** She sees the glimmer of light off of a metal casing and, in the instant that Remmé opens her mouth to scream out a warning, lashes out her arm to snake her hand around her lover’s wrist, knowing, in that instant, what it is that is about to happen, and determined that it will play out as she saw it, so long ago, on that first blissful night they spent together, and that the light (and heat and fire and death) of the explosion will swallow them both whole, and so leave their Queen and their other friends untouched.

**Author's Note:**

>  **Clarification Note:** One of the reasons why my AU **Star Wars** series _**You Became to Me**_ is so entirely not even nearly complete has to do with the fact that I really started writing at the wrong end of the prequel trilogy for an AU (in my defense, though, when I started what became my _Thwarting the Revenge of the Sith_ trio, which is over a million words long, I thought I was doing a sort of one-shot fix-it based on an idea I got for "fixing" RotS by changing something that happens very near the end of James Luceno's EU novel _Labyrinth of Evil_ , which is set immediately prior to RotS). One of these days, I fully intend to rectify that problem by going back and starting from the beginning, with an AU rewrite of TPM, which is why I took the time to do a character study sketch for a supporting character like Zoé. She'll be showing up again, in a more prominent role, whenever I get around to that AU rewrite of TPM. Folks might want to keep that in mind when reading this, since technically this is spoilerish for an AU novel that I haven't gotten around to writing yet!


End file.
